About

Biography:
Mike Perry is a designer and artist working in numerous media: books, magazines, films, newspapers. He draws, paints, and illustrates. He animates. He cuts, pastes, and builds. He creates sculpture projects and installations. He crafts limited-edition silkscreen posters as well as large-scale ad campaigns. He curates books and monographs. He can be enlisted to design Mike Perry originals for display at home or office. He gets lost in pattern and wants you to get lost with him, too. He wants to mesmerize and awaken you through his constellations of line, form, shape, color, idea.

Perry art-directs, designs books, and paints portraits. He wants your eyes to dance, and your mind and mojo along with them. He is working on children’s books and has been invited to contribute to literary magazines. Black-and-whites, muted colors, neons, shades of purple, images enchanting and cacophonous: Liftoff. He brands and has a helluva beard. He teaches. He writes the Twitter feed himself. And, yes, he does online giveaways. Have you seen his Tumblr? He’s working on a cooking show. He’s made T-shirts and Nike shoes. His appetite for collaboration and creation are omnivorous. His curiosity and creative aspiration are boundless. If you want to work with him, buy something from him, commission him, interview him, then the line, so to speak, is open. He’s just like that. The possibilities are endless.

Perry is intrigued by spiraling galaxies of mind and thought, by questions like, “What is your unique history of Infinity?” With his work, he wants to remind you of your exquisite magnificence. He seeks to create planetariums of inner space and imagination. He wants you to recognize our poetic interdependence. He is seduced, juiced, intoxicated by the ways the hand-drawn informs and transforms contemporary visual culture and the experience of life itself. His art and installations can be meditative or hyperactively sublime.

Perry works regularly for a number of editorial and commercial clients including Apple, The New York Times, Dwell, Target, Urban Outfitters, Aldo, and Nike. His 2012 monograph, Wondering Around Wandering, is an anthology that is at turns humorous, mystical, poetic, warm, sexy, charming, serene. Watercolor sunsets at the edge of space-time juxtaposed with houses on doughnuts floating in whitespace. His use of color, pattern, and form expresses a joyful spirit and a reverence for the laughter-bliss that is inherent in the human experience. Perry integrates all moods and sentiments—our yearnings and archetypes—into an aesthetic world that is sometimes minimally evocative of a gouached big bang, and at other times collaged portraits of daydream reveries. Fields of colors and patterns are doorways to alternative universes that represent your own possibility better than anything you can see. His forms and characters may appear to be child-like, but these journeys into our essential existential are not. He seeks to create a new spiritual meme, to remind us to delight when witnessing this ecstatic cosmos. And he has fun doing it. He wants you to have fun doing it, too.

Perry has garnered numerous accolades and awards. In 2008, Print magazine selected him for its esteemed New Visual Artist award. The Art Directors Club chose him for its “Young Guns” group and exhibition the same year. In 2007, he was named “Groundbreaking Illustrator” by Computer Arts Projects, and way back when (in 2004), he was chosen as one of Step magazine’s “30 Under 30.” His work has been exhibited around the world including at two recent, solo shows in Tokyo: We are the Infinity of Each Other at B Gallery and Color, Shapes and Infinity at Public Image 3D Gallery.

In addition to his commercial, nonprofit, and personal artwork, Perry has also published extensively. His first book, Hand Job, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2006, pays homage to the relevance and beauty of hand-drawn type in the digital age. Over and Over: A Catalog of Hand-Drawn Patterns (2008), explores the nuanced texture, humor, and elegance of illustrative patterns. A third book, entitled Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing, was released in March 2011, showcasing the silk-screened extravaganza of contemporary artists and designers. His fourth book title Wondering Around Wandering Work So Far… focused on the last 8 years of art output.

Perry is originally from Kansas City, Missouri. His creative adventure began at age 13 when his grandfather a painter himself gave him a tackle box full of paint. From then on, it has been one canvas, silkscreen, notebook page, paper, and poster print after another. Perry went to Minneapolis College of Art and Design for a degree in graphic design, and his first job was designing for Urban Outfitters where he worked for 3 years.

Most days, Perry is engaged in stream-of-consciousness visual narration at his Brooklyn studio. He uses his pen, inks, paints, pencil, collage, structure, shape, and paper as moment-to-moment investigations into the future becoming the present—limning the to be that is past. [Like any mass of electrons, sea salt, trace elements, and consciousness worth its salt, on some days, he is not really on, or of, this planet.] In his process of discovery, he can be found mixing colors, pulling prints, building sculptures and following lines all throughout his studio. In his notebook are sketches of things to come and the evolving master blueprint of Perryland. He is continually exercising his belief in the transformative power of making things. His work can be considered love notes to the abstract, unknowable future that is all possibility [in the present]. He invites you to join him on this curious journey to discover more of the unknown. He is grateful that you are here.

Published / Featured Magazines:Elle Girl / Featured Artist October 2010Tokion / Featured Artist May 2010ReadyMade / Studio Visit 2010Page One / Featured Artist March 2010Nylon Korea / Featured Artist Janurary 2010Elephant / Featured Artist Winter 2009-10Varoom / Featured Artist 2009
Design*Sponge & The New York Public Library / Design by the Book Featured Artist 2008Reload / Featured Artist 2008Grafik / A to Z of Illustration / Cover and Feature 2008Feasthetic / Cover and Feature 2008Block / Featured Artist 2008Arkitip / Featured Artist 2008Brooklyn Industry / Featured Artist 2007Arkitip / Featured Artist 2007Territory, No. 3 / Power Houses of Design
STEP magazine / January–February 2004 / Top 25 young designers under the age of 35